As the capacity of data and information storage and retrieval systems and servers increase and the desirability of providing sometimes significant capacity for growth on such systems increases, storage devices, such as rotating magnetic hard disk drives may have large regions of media that are subject to wear and aging by virtue of the operation of the hard disk drive generally, the movement of one or more transducer heads over the media surface when accessing other regions of the disk drive, and any power-up (spin-up) or power-down (spin-down) that the media surface may be subjected to.
Therefore, although it is known to scan disk drive media to determine the viability of writing to and reading from a disk drive surface, such disk drive scanning and testing have heretofore been limited. For example, there remains a need to be able to perform preemptive and proactive diagnostics on regions of a disk drive or other recording media based storage system on a non-interfering basis during normal operation of the storage system so that media that defects are identified before attempts are made to write data to such media. There also remains a need for the ability to perform non-destructive write testing to regions of the disk drives that have previously been written to by a host computer system storing data to and retrieving data from the storage system, particularly where the data may constitute an archive of data or information that was written previously and will not be routinely accessed.